Yeah only made the last half of escrima but what I did was pretty good - two different drills, both of which I had a taste of a few months ago, but doing 'em properly now
First one was a defensive drill, single stick against two attacking, they give two angled high strikes followed by two overhead strikes followed by two stabs, defender's gotta move & defend properly against all of them without getting overwhelmed or leaving themselves open, and they come quick and intense 'cause that's how this grade goes; I didn't do it perfectly, could handle my training partners just fine but the instructor gave me more trouble, but y'know that's a matter of practice, I often do my best when pressured so I've no doubt I can get it before long, indeed I seemed to pick it up quicker than the others the moment I walked in the door despite being an hour late, they were like "well you seem to have got this down already, I wanna see how you do it" while I pointed out every damn time that my regular training partner took the first two strikes stepping back and that's why he always ended up overwhelmed like dude Don't Run Away is literally our #2 rule that we get taught from the beginning come on stop doing that
Did that for nearly the whole time I was there, but the last 15 minutes we practiced rolling off the power, which I tried to describe in a post a few months ago but is still not very easy to put into words. I did try tonight as well though, 'cause again I got this more intuitively than the others, we mostly did it unarmed this time (punch comes in hard, you roll off the power to crash into the side of their neck and push them back), what I said at the time to try and help was "imagine your body is like a coiled spring, that block isn't really a block so much as you're using the force in their arm to push against, gather it into yourself and then release it into them" which feels like a lot of words to describe a move I was making in a single second but like I said before this is something you feel in your body more than you think about, there's some complex theory behind this grade; anyway yeah I did get that pretty quick, I'm always good unarmed, at one point a couple of the other instructors came over to join in just 'cause they liked the look of it mostly from what I was doing, one of them (nice guy, into the bass-heavy dub side of post-punk, formidable fighter, trained a lot in boxing, pretty beefy) wanted to throw a few punches at me to see how it looked from inside and on the very first one I did it well enough to push him like half the width of the room (despite y'know him being probably several weight classes above me), he was like "damn ha alright yeah you've got that, nice work, I'll really try and keep my footing with these now"
